I'm Rerunning this piece on Shasta McNasty Because Why the Hell Not?
I could be mistaken but I thought the reason women became lesbians is because they’re sexually attracted to women.
As the decadent 1990s approached the millennium pop culture evolved, or de-evolved, depending on your perspective, into a glittering Sodom & Gomorrah forever tempting the fury of an Old Testament God with its extravagant stupidity.
A mesmerizingly desperate new network called UPN led the charge with shows whose names would become synonymous with television schlock, titles like The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfieffer, Homeboys From Outer Space, Chains of Love (a reality romance competition that got its name from contestants literally being chained together) and Shasta McNasty.
Shasta McNasty quietly changed its name to Shasta as part of an elaborate re-tooling late in its first and only season but it was too little, too late. A show people knew only for having an unforgettably, iconically stupid, and regrettable name continued to be a show half-remembered solely for its title.
Shasta McNasty’s name was a giant “Kick Me” sign the whole world could see even as it did a good job conveying the overall tone of the show in being so unbelievably stupid it was hard to believe it wasn’t a put-on.
This is the last thing you see before being pressured into doing Fireball shots.
There’s a lot about Shasta McNasty that is boldly, brazenly post-modern. Style-wise, it’s ahead of the curve in being a fast-paced, one-camera sitcom with a fourth-wall-breaking anti-hero that’s full of cutaways, pop-culture references, and parody. Shasta McNasty does not have a laugh track. Unfortunately, it does not have laughs either.
Yet there’s nothing at all meta about Shasta McNasty’s awfulness. It’s targeted exclusively not at men or even guys but rather bros. Bros are like men and guys except they’re dumb assholes whose existence revolves around trying to trick attractive women into showing them their boobs. There’s nothing wrong about trying to look at boobs. It is a noble, even heroic pursuit but seldom leads to sublime comedy.
In Shasta McNasty the bros in question are the titular rap-rock trio. There’s leader Scott (Carmine Giovinazzo), a smart-ass who communicates directly with the audience through fourth wall-shattering asides and Randy (Dale Godboldo), an African-American the show is not too “politically correct” to depict as a career criminal and thief with a penchant for spinning wild tales in order to get into women’s pants.
Jake Busey rounds out the toxic trio as dumbass doofus Dennis. Dennis likes boobs. Scott and Randy like boobs as well but Dennis likes boobs to such an extent that it’s his defining characteristic. But he has other interests as well. He also loves lingerie since it showcases boobs at their most alluring, but what Dennis REALLY loves are lesbians.
Bear in mind, Dennis isn’t into bisexual women because he’d like to have a threesome with two women. He doesn’t seem to know that bisexuality even exists so he’s not angling for a Menage A Trois.
Instead, Dennis believes that lesbians are magical, altruistic creatures who will either let heterosexual men participate in their unbelievably hot sex lives despite being, by definition, not sexually attracted to bros or give straight men a lifetime of sexual excitement through their mere existence.
Lesbians consequently only exist in Shasta McNasty as figures of sexual fantasy and punchlines. This is true of its odious pilot, which depicts our ostensible anti-heroes/actual villains less as horny bros than as sex criminals, scum bag dipshit Monkees for a shitty new era.
The pilot finds Shasta McNasty happily video-taping their sexy neighbor having sexy sex with her boyfriend. But it’s not enough to record this poor woman having sex surreptitiously and then masturbate to the images.
When the bros discover that the woman whose sex life they’re secretly taping is being cheated on they decide to spring into action. They sneak into the poor woman’s apartment and plant underwear in it so that the woman who is unwittingly starring in their homemade, illegal pornography will be so distraught by her boyfriend’s infidelity that she’ll have rebound sex with Scott in appreciation for lending her a shoulder to cry on.
Scott is established as both the brains and the conscience of the group, in that he is a horrible person but does not appear to be a total sociopath, yet he is very much into playing sick mind games with a stranger for the sake of getting laid.
The trio’s psychotic ruse ultimately proves too successful in convincing the unnamed mystery woman (played, appropriately enough, by early online It Girl Cindy Margolis) that men are all unfaithful dogs because while she did, in fact, opt for rebound sex after learning about her boyfriend’s infidelity it’s with a woman.
This is how Shasta McNasty decided to introduce its characters to the American people, although I should also note that there is a very long sequence in which Scott beats up an angry, violent parrot that threatens to “pop a cap” in his ass and calls him a jerk-off repeatedly.
In the next episode, Shasta McNasty’s charmless lummoxes have a dog named Dinner that they “liberated” from a Korean butcher who gave him the name because unless a white man had intervened in a timely fashion, the canine was going to be his meal for the evening.
We never see poor Dinner again. He’s not in the background of shots. He doesn’t play a role in subsequent episodes despite Americans loving dogs above all things, including their children. No, Dinner was only onscreen for the sake of a racist anti-Asian joke. Even the dogs in Shasta McNasty deserve better.
The Dinner joke sets the bar awfully high for offensiveness but Shasta McNasty manages to soar over it continually over the course of its twenty-two episode run.
The next episode, “Little Dude” begins with a bona fide SLUR in its introduction. It opens by once again breaking the fourth wall and having Three’s Company’s Richard Kline saying that no little people were harmed in the making of that week’s episode.
But Kline does not use the phrase little people. Instead he uses two more anachronistic, less sensitive terms to describe little people, the more offensive of which begins with M. This phrase wasn’t considered AS offensive in 1999 as it is today but it was nevertheless understood to be cruel and out of date, as evidenced by Verne Troyer kicking Kline and telling him that “little people” is the correct term.
It’s far from the only time Shasta McNasty is deliberately offensive, only to wink away the ugliness by positing it as a bad taste gag.
In “Chubby Chick”, for example, the fourth episode, Scott tells his housemates that if they want to score they should try to make it with anorexic chicks, since women with issues around eating have low self-esteem and a need for validation they can exploit for sex.
When they happily acquiesce, Scott breaks the fourth wall to tell us he was only joking, but that doesn’t negate that the rest of the episode is about how women with issues around eating have low self-esteem and a need for validation that can be exploited for sex.
Only instead of Dennis unethically exploiting the insecurities of women who are unhealthily thin, he hits on a woman in an over-eating support group with a mind towards convincing her to lose weight so that he will be able to find her sexually desirable.
A night of ecstatic lovemaking changes Dennis’ mind. He goes from finding overweight women physically repulsive to fetishizing them as sexual dynamos who “try harder” because they have to in order to compete.
Like a true sociopath, Dennis decides that his happiness is dependent on tricking his new lover into remaining overweight so that she won’t have the confidence to leave him. With a ghoulish grin on that giant gourd of his, Dennis lovingly feeds his oblivious new sex partner fattening food and drinks that she wrongly thinks are low-calorie.
Shasta McNasty can’t conceive of straight men being attracted to someone that size as anything other than a weird kink and/or opportunistic way to game the system.
In a similarly scuzzy, dispiriting development, in the aforementioned “Little Dude”, the trio helps Verne (Verne Troyer) recover from getting fired from his job having patrons at a Mexican restaurant eat chips and salsa from a giant novelty sombrero on his head after getting into a physical altercation with the entirety of Shasta McNasty, only to learn that Scott’s girlfriend has had sex with the diminutive ball of rage.
In case we’re tempted to assume that the woman was attracted to Verne’s personality or looks, the episode ends with her in bed with guest star Gary Coleman (playing himself, of course) being asked to say, “De plane, de plane!” as part of their sex play.
In meta framing segments an offscreen, upper crust narrator lists things that Verne Troyer is taller than, including a medium sized pizza and seven rolls of toilet paper. Comparing a human being to seven rolls of Charmin is injurious to the human soul on an individual and collective level.
That’s true of most of Troyer’s role here. Little people actors through the decades have often had to make an impossible choice between positive onscreen representation and working regularly or even semi-regularly.
With Shasta McNasty Troyer opted to work, to do the best he could with a role that’s essentially a sentient site gag whose height and physical appearance are constantly being referenced in mocking ways.
That’s the price of visibility, too often: the cost Troyer paid for being one of the only little people on television in a regular role when Shasta McNasty aired was a part that never allowed audiences to forget that Troyer was not the same as his cast-members.
UPN seemed to realize, along with everyone else, what a DOA dud they had with Shasta McNasty. So they decided that the way to save a show widely mocked for being called Shasta McNasty
involved removing “McNasty" from the title.
The show got less McNasty in other ways as well. A raunchy jiggle fest that began as a glorified twenty-two minute Axe Body Spray commercial took a hard turn into Friends territory when a kinder, gentler Scott became the center of a love triangle between the cute, non-threatening girl next door who has a massive crush on him and his ex-girlfriend.
Early in the show’s ill-fated run, Randy quips that they’re Shasta McNasty, not Shasta McNice. That wasn’t necessarily true at the end. Turning Shasta McNasty into a bland romance centered around the bar that Verne owns and operates didn’t save the show but it did make it less egregiously terrible. It also made it less memorable.
Through its spectacular incompetence, Shasta McNasty ended up accomplishing something wonderful. The show’s toxic buzz and terrible ratings spelled doom for the program cursed to follow it, the animated adaptation of Scott Adams’ Dilbert.
Adams dubbed Shasta McNasty “the worst TV show ever made” and held it responsible for the cancellation of Dilbert, though he later argued that his show was in fact cancelled for being “white.”
We’ll never ultimately know whether Dilbert was cancelled due to the lingering stink of Shasta McNasty or the plague of diversity causing people like Scott Adams to not be as wealthy and successful as they obviously deserve to be.
What I do know is that thinking about Adams learning that the success or failure of the Dilbert cartoon would be inextricably intertwined with the fate of something called Shasta McNasty makes me happy.
Shasta McNasty is the tacky ghost that haunts the failure of Adams’ big shot at Jim Davis/James L. Brooks money and multi-media fame. When Adams finally dies and his life flashes before him there’s at least a slight chance that it will contain at least a fleeting glimpse of Shasta McNasty, possibly of Verne Troyer wearing a giant sombrero designed to hold tortillas chips and salsa.
That possibility alone justifies the show’s otherwise indefensible existence.
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